Ch 0 Intro

This section introduces some of the main themes and historical issues in the history of mass media.  It’s meant to provide a “toolkit” and frame of reference for issues that come up throughout the book.

History Links on this site

Discussion questions

  1. What is the purpose of history?  Read  “How great are we?”  by Daniel Immerwahr in the Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2020.  It’s not the right question,  he says. What is?  The American Historical Association also had something to say about that.
  2. What is pseudo-history?  There is controversy around the 1776 Report, Jan. 2021 by the Trump Administration, and the November, 2022 Virginia history standards.  Both of these have been  widely criticized by nearly all associations of historians.  The 1776 report had two main themes, said the AHA.  “One is an homage to the Founding Fathers, a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements. The other is a screed against a half-century of historical scholarship, presented largely as a series of caricatures, using single examples (most notably the “1619 Project”) to represent broader historiographical trends.”  (Full 1776 Report available here).  A Jan 24, 2021 NPR report on the commission is here.    An op-ed by historian  Michael Kazin, “The 1776 Follies: Trump’s defunct commission on American history was unintentionally revealing,”  was published Feb. 1 in the New York Times.
  3. Utopianism:  How were new technologies celebrated? What are some examples of what Leo Marx called the “rhetoric of the technological sublime?”   Can we distinguish utopianism from the idea of projecting a positive vision for a technology?
  4. Luddite / Distopian views of media: What were some of the fears of new media technologies? How did they influence the way technologies were developed and regulated?
  5. McLuhan’s Tetrad:  Give individual examples of the way different media enhance, retrieve, obsolesce and reverse.
  6. Oral cultures:  Play the “telephone” game —  Send a whispered message from person-to-person in a group of people. Send a second message through another group but reward that group for accuracy.  What does this tell you about the potential success of oral cultures?
  7. Media Revolution? Or not?  Journalist Michael Wolff questions the idea of digital media being revolutionary and says the old media won the battle. Is he right?
  8. Council of Historians?  Does the White House need a council of historians, as Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson argue in this Sept. 2016 article in the Atlantic?

Documentary videos

  1. The medium is the message — Australian television interview with Marshall McLuhan in 1977.
  2. Author Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan debate, Canadian Broadcasting Corp.,  1968.
  3. The Story of Communication, 20th Century Fox, 1947.  An interesting and hopeful view about the promise of international communication in the promising post WWII environment.

People and events

Historians:  Herodutus, Thucydides, Von Ranke, Acton, Butterfield, Stantayana, McLuhan, Zinn 

Concepts: Determinism, social construction, whig history, doomed to repeat history, objective history, social theories of media, utopian versus luddite approaches to technology, technological fallacies, Innis’ durable versus flexible media, McLuhan’s tetrad, hot and cool media

Historical theory and media technology Links

  1. Walter Ong
  2. Traditional Oral Cultures
  3. Doug Brent, “Oral Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge: Speculations on the History of Ownership”
  4. Harold Innis,  Empire and Communication, great Wikipedia article on cultural influences of durable and flexible media / time and space “bias”
  5. Celebrating 100 years of Marshall McLuhan 
  6. Jim Andrews, McLuhan reconsidered   

Marshall McLuhan according to Camille Paglia:

It’s just shocking to me that we’ve had a period over the last 20 years where a bunch of French theorists who know nothing about media have been the dominant god figures of the Ivy League and all other kinds of chic campuses across the country. It just amazes me because none of the French theorists, none of the experts in post-structuralism know anything about media. Nothing whatever. These are figures that pre-date World War II in their thinking, they were untouched by media in the North American sense, in the kind of all-encompassing, total-immersion sense that we know it here, even the kinds of thinking that you get out of the so-called Frankfurt School, associated with Adorno, dates to the 1930s in Germany! It’s amazing to me! But right now if you go to any of the cutting edge campuses (supposedly), in this country, you will get mass media fed to you through a number of ridiculous sieves. You will get it either through pro-structuralism, you will get it through the Frankfurt School, or through semiotics, all of which to me is a big pile of manure that we have to just flush! We already had a North American shaman of media, and that was McLuhan … My theory is this: that the people who are most affected by McLuhan did not go on to graduate school.

Paglia shares a “religious interpretation” of sensory media with McLuhan, in that she sees religious orthodoxy being opposed in three historical epochs: the Renaissance, the Romantic era, and the era of mass culture.   Paglia is a controversial speaker whose views about life’s hard knocks are sometimes repugnant,   according to a 2019 article in the Atlantic.   But it’s refreshing to see McLuhan and the Frankfurt School described as out of date and out of touch with the relentless assault of new media technologies.

Information Age by Lil B

Scene from Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall about Marshall McLuhan